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August 29, 2011

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trivia Quiz: What is the name of that dog?

Facebook Pedophiles, Hebephiles and Ephebophiles, Oh My!

Michael Jackson probably wasn’t a pedophile—at least, not in the strict, biological sense of the word. It’s a morally loaded term, pedophile, that has become synonymous with the very basest of evils. (In fact it’s hard to even say it aloud without cringing, isn’t it?) But according to sex researchers, it’s also a grossly misused term.

If Jackson did fall outside the norm in his “erotic age orientation”—and we may never know if he did—he was almost certainly what’s called a hebephile, a newly proposed diagnostic classification in which people display a sexual preference for children at the cusp of puberty, between the ages of, roughly, 11 to 14 years of age. Pedophiles, in contrast, show a sexual preference for clearly prepubescent children. There are also ephebophiles (from ephebos, meaning “one arrived at puberty” in Greek), who are mostly attracted to 15- to 16-year-olds; teleiophiles (from teleios, meaning, “full grown” in Greek), who prefer those 17 years of age or older); and even the very rare gerontophile (from gerontos, meaning “old man” in Greek), someone whose sexual preference is for the elderly. So although child sex offenders are often lumped into the single classification of pedophilia, biologically speaking it’s a rather complicated affair. Some have even proposed an additional subcategory of pedophilia, “infantophilia,” to distinguish those individuals most intensely attracted to children below six years of age.

Based on this classification scheme of erotic age orientations, even the world’s best-known fictitious “pedophile,” Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, would more properly be considered a hebephile. (Likewise the protagonist from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a work that I’ve always viewed as something of the “gay Lolita”). Consider Humbert’s telltale description of a “nymphet.” After a brief introduction to those “pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes,” Humbert explains:

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.” 

Although Michael Jackson might have suffered more disgrace from his hebephilic orientation than most, and his name will probably forever be entangled darkly with the sinister phrase “little boys,” he wasn’t the first celebrity or famous figure that could be seen as falling into this hebephilic category. In fact, ironically, Michael Jackson’s first wife, Lisa Marie Presley, is the product of a hebephilic attraction. After all, let’s not forget that Priscilla caught Elvis’s very grownup eye when she was just fourteen, only a year or two older than the boys that Michael Jackson was accused of sexually molesting. Then there’s of course also the scandalous Jerry Lee Lewis incident in which the 23-year-old “Great Balls of Fire” singer married his 13-year-old first cousin.

In the psychiatric community, there’s recently been a hubbub of commotion concerning whether hebephelia should be designated as a medical disorder or, instead, seen simply as a normal variant of sexual orientation and not indicative of brain pathology. There are important policy implications of adding hebephilia to the checklist of mental illnesses, since doing so might allow people who sexually abuse pubescent children to invoke a mental illness defense.

One researcher who is arguing vociferously for the inclusion of hebephilia in the American Psychiatric Association's revised diagnostic manual (the DSM-V) is University of Toronto psychologist Ray Blanchard. In last month’s issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, Blanchard and his colleagues provide new evidence that many people diagnosed under the traditional label of pedophilia are in fact not as interested in prepubescent children as they are early adolescents.

To tease apart these erotic age orientation differences, Blanchard and his colleagues studied 881 men (straight and gay) in his laboratory using phallometric testing (also known as penile plethysmography) while showing them visual images of differently aged nude models. Because this technique measures penile blood volume changes, it’s seen as being a fairly objective index of sexual arousal to what’s being shown on the screen—which, for those attracted to children and young adolescents, the participant might verbally deny being attracted to. In other words, the penis isn’t a very good liar. So, for example, in Blanchard’s study, the image of a naked 12-year-old girl (nothing prurient, but rather resembling a subject in a medical textbook) was accompanied by the following audiotaped narrative: 

“You are watching a late movie on TV with your neighbors’ 12-year-old daughter. You have your arm around her shoulders, and your fingers brush against her chest. You realize that her breasts have begun to develop…” 

Blanchard and his coauthors found that the men in their sample fell into somewhat discrete categories of erotic age orientation—some had the strongest penile response to the prepubescent children (the pedophiles), others to the pubescent children (the hebephiles), and the remainder to the adults shown on screen (the teleiophiles). These categories weren’t mutually exclusive. For example, some teleiophiles showed some arousal to pubescent children, some hebephiles showed some attraction to prepubescent children, and so on. But the authors did find that it’s possible to distinguish empirically between a “true pedophile” and a hebephile using this technique, in terms of the age ranges for which men exhibited their strongest arousal. They also conclude that, based on the findings from this study, hebephilia “is relatively common compared with other forms of erotic interest in children.”

In the second half of their article, Blanchard and his colleagues argue that hebephilia should be added to the newly revised DSM-V as a genuine paraphilic mental disorder—differentiating it from pedophilia. But many of his colleagues working in this area are strongly opposed to doing this.

Men who find themselves primarily attracted to young or middle-aged adolescents are clearly disadvantaged in today’s society, but historically (and evolutionarily) this almost certainly wasn’t the case. In fact, hebephiles—or at least ephebephiles—would have had a leg up over their competition. Evolutionary psychologists have found repeatedly that markers of youth correlate highly with perceptions of beauty and attractiveness. For straight men, this makes sense, since a woman’s reproductive value declines steadily after the age of about twenty. Obviously having sex with a prepubescent child would be fruitless—literally. But, whether we like it or not, this isn’t so for a teenage girl who has just come of age, who is reproductively viable and whose brand-new state of fertility can more or less ensure paternity for the male. These evolved motives were portrayed in the film Pretty Baby, in which a young Brooke Shields plays the role of twelve-old-old Violet Neil, a prostitute’s daughter in 1917’s New Orleans whose coveted virginity goes up for auction to the highest bidder.

Understanding adult gay men’s attraction to young males is more of a puzzle. Evolutionary psychologist Frank Muscarella’s “alliance formation theory” is the only one that I’m aware of that attempts to do this. This theory holds that homoerotic behavior between older, high status men and teenage boys serves as a way for the latter to move up in ranks, a sort of power-for-sex bargaining chip. The most obvious example of this type of homosexual dynamic was found in ancient Greece, but male relationships in a handful of New Guinea tribes display these homoerotic patterns as well. There are also, ahem, plenty of present-day examples of this in Congress. Oscar Wilde probably would have signed on to this theoretical perspective. After all, his famous “love that dare not speak its name” wasn’t homosexuality, per se, but rather a “great affection of an elder for a younger man”: 

...as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo… It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

But, generally speaking, Muscarella’s theory doesn’t seem to pull a lot of weight. Not many teenage boys in any culture seem terribly interested in taking this particular route to success. Rather—and I may be wrong about this—but I think most teenage boys would prefer to scrub toilets for the rest of their lives or sell soft bagels at the mall than become the sexual plaything of an “older gentlemen.”

In any event, given the biological (even adaptive) verities of being attracted to adolescents, most experts in this area find it completely illogical for Blanchard to recommend adding hebephilia to the revised DSM-V. (Especially since other more clearly maladaptive paraphilias—such as gerontophilia, in which men are attracted primarily to elderly, post-menopausal women—are not presently included in the diagnostic manual.) The push to pathologize hebephilia, argues forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, appears to be motivated more by “a booming cottage industry” in forensic psychology, not coincidentally linked with a “punitive era of moral panic." Because “civil incapacitation” (basically, the government’s ability to strip a person of his or her civil rights in the interests of public safety) requires that the person be suffering from a diagnosable mental disorder or abnormality, Franklin calls Blanchard’s proposal “a textbook example of subjective values masquerading as science.” Another critic, forensic psychologist Gregory DeClue, suggests that such medical classifications are being based on arbitrary distinctions dictated by cultural standards: 

Pedophilia is a mental disorder. Homosexuality is not. Should hebephilia of ephebophilia or gerontophilia be considered mental disorders? How about sexual preference for people with different (or with the same) ethnic characteristics as oneself? 

And Marquette University psychologist Thomas Zander, points out that since chronological age doesn’t always perfectly match physical age, including these subtle shades of erotic age preferences would be problematic from a diagnostic perspective:

Imagine how much more impractical it would be to require forensic evaluators to determine the existence of pedophilia based on the stage of adolescence of the examinee’s victim. Such determinations could literally devolve into a splitting of pubic hairs.

One unexplored question, and one inseparable from the case of Michael Jackson, is whether we tend to be more forgiving of a person’s sexual peccadilloes when that individual has some invaluable or culturally irreplaceable abilities. For example, consider the following true story:

There once was a man who fancied young boys. Being that laws were more lax in other nations, this man decided to travel to a foreign country, leaving his wife and young daughter behind, where he met up with another Westerner who shared in his predilections for pederasty, and there the two of them spent their happy vacation scouring the seedy underground of this country searching for pimps and renting out boys for sex.

Now if you’re like most people, you’re probably experiencing a shiver of disgust and a spark of rage. You likely feel these men should have their testicles drawn and quartered by wild mares, be thrown to a burly group of rapists, castrated with garden sheers or, if you’re the pragmatic sort, treated as any other sick animal in the herd would be treated, with a humane bullet to the temple or perhaps a swift and sure current of potassium chloride injected into the arm.

But notice the subtle change in your perceptions when I tell you that these events are from the autobiography of AndrĂ© Gide, who in 1947—long after he’d publicized these very details—won the Nobel prize in literature. Gide is in fact bowdlerizing his time in Algiers with none other than Oscar Wilde. 

Wilde took a key out of his pocket and showed me into a tiny apartment of two rooms… The youths followed him, each of them wrapped in a burnous that hid his face. Then the guide left us and Wilde sent me into the further room with little Mohammed and shut himself up in the other with the [other boy]. Every time since then that I have sought after pleasure, it is the memory of that night I have pursued.

It’s not that we think it’s perfectly fine for Gide and Wilde to have sex with minors or even that they shouldn’t have been punished for such behaviors. (In fact Wilde was sentenced in London to two years hard labor for related offenses not long after this Maghreb excursion with Gide and died in penniless ignominy.) But somehow, as with our commingled feelings for Michael Jackson, “the greatest entertainer of all time,” the fact that these men were national treasures somehow dilutes our moralistic anger, as though we’re more willing to suffer their vices given the remarkable literary gifts they bestowed.

Would you really have wanted Oscar Wilde euthanized as though he were a sick animal? Should AndrĂ© Gide, whom the New York Times hailed in their obituary as a man “judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti,” have been deprived of his pen, torn to pieces by illiterate thugs? It’s complicated. And although in principle we know that all men are equal in the eyes of the law, just as we did for Michael Jackson during his child molestation trials, I have a hunch that many people tend to feel (and uncomfortably so) a little sympathy for the Devil under such circumstances.

In this column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature. Sign up for the RSS feed or friend Dr. Bering on Facebook and never miss an installment again.

 

 

Correction (posted 7/2/09): When this story was originally posted, we incorrectly stated that the DSM-IV is published by the American Psychological Association, rather than the American Psychiatric Association. Scientific American regrets the error.

Jesse Bering ​ Image: Advertisement http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N5960.1147.SCIENTIFICAMERICAN/B5540054.3;sz=30... ?"> Michael Jackson probably wasn’t a pedophile —at least, not in the strict, biological sense of the word. It’s a morally loaded term, pedophile, that has become synonymous with the ...»See Ya

Boing 747 Missed Approach

Boing-Boing

August 28, 2011

The Joy of Self-Defecation

Displaying all 4 posts.
  • People today pay little attention to the important things in life. This is because the important things often have little to do with Ego. Like communication. I walked by a sign recently that said "Danger due to: Falling Derbis." Someone had carelessly spelled the word, thinking only of themselves and not of others. What if I thought there were falling Derbis? What are those? I would stand there furrowing my brow, trying to figure out what the heck Derbis is and get smacked on the head by some careless worker's wayward hammer or lunchbox.

    People today need to discover that there are others around. They need to discover the joy of self-defecation. When you feel the pressures of egoism and individualism building up inside you, especially after a big meal, you need to defecate yourself to bring your ego back into its place.

    People who take all of the credit are bloated with selfishness and do not understand the feeling of release and lightness that can come with self-defecation.

    Try defecating yourself. Think about communication. Think about others. It will feel great and careless errors will cease making the world a safer place.over a year ago · Report

  • I mean self-deprecationover a year ago · Report
  • You are so funny, but very very wiseover a year ago · Report
  • i have to admit i liked defecation much better

shitting himself or sincere? hard to know for sure

Topic: The Joy of Self-Defecation Displaying all 4 posts. Joe Rottweiler People today pay little attention to the important things in life. This is because the important things often have little to do with Ego. Like communication. I walked by a sign recently that said "Danger due to: Falling Derbis. ...»See Ya

Tom R. Toe - YouTube

Gogotanzers + Traks Get Ready (Best to worst)

Horselover Fat

 

VALIS

 

1

Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more to be on the safe side .

At once Horselover Fat leaped to the conclusion that this was her way of asking for help. It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things; get of+ dope ( which he hadn't done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people ).

As a matter of fact, he had no Nembutals. He had no sleeping pills of any sort. He never did sleeping pills. He did uppers. So giving Gloria sleeping pills by which she could kill herself was beyond his power. Anyhow, he wouldn't have done it if he could.

"I have ten," he said. Because if he told her the truth she would hang up.

"Then I'll drive up to your place," Gloria said in a rational, calm voice, the same tone in which she had asked for the pills.

He realized then that she was not asking for help. She was trying to die. She was completely crazy. If she were sane she would realize that it was necessary to veil her purpose, because this way she made him guilty of complicity. For him to agree, he would need to want her dead. No motive existed for him-or anyone-to want that. Gloria was gentle and civilized, but she dropped a lot of acid. It was obvious that the acid, since he had last heard from her six months ago, had wrecked her mind.

"What've you been doing?" Fat asked.

"I've been in Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. I tried suicide and my mother committed me. They discharged me last week."

"Are you cured?" he said.

"Yes," she said.

That's when Fat began to go nuts. At the time he didn't know it, but he had been drawn into an unspeakable psychological game. There was no way out. Gloria Knudson had wrecked him, her friend, along with her own brain. Probably she had wrecked six or seven other people, all friends who loved her, along the way, with similar phone conversations. She had undoubtedly destroyed her mother and father as well. Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void. He was not dealing with a person; he had a reflex-arc thing at the other end of the phone line.

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.

"Where are you now?" he asked.

"'Modesto. At my parents' home."

Since he lived in Marin County, she was several hours' drive away. Few inducements would have gotten him to make such a drive. This was another serving-up of lunacy: three hours' drive each way for ten Nembutals. Why not just total the car? Gloria was not even committing her irrational act rationally. Thank you, Tim Leary, Fat thought. You and your promotion of the joy of expanded consciousness through dope.

He did not know his own life was on the line. This was 1971. In 1972 he would be up north in Vancouver, British Columbia, involved in trying to kill himself, alone, poor and scared, in a foreign city. Right now he was spared that knowledge. All he wanted to do was coax Gloria up to Marin County so he could help her. One of God's greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded. In 1976, totally crazy with grief, Horselover Fat would slit his wrist (the Vancouver suicide attempt having failed), take forty-nine tablets of high- grade digitalis, and sit in a closed garage with his car motor running-and fail there, too. Well, the body has powers unknown to the mind, Gloria 's mind had total control over her body; she was rationally insane.

Most insanity can be identified with the bizarre and the theatrical. You put a pan on your head and a towel around your waist, paint yourself purple and go outdoors. Gloria was as calm as she had ever been; polite and civilized. If she had lived in ancient Rome or Japan, she would have gone unnoticed. Her driving skills probably remained unimpaired. She would stop at every red light and not exceed the speed limit-on her trip to pick up the ten Nembutals.

I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity. I did not love Gloria Knudson, but I liked her. In Berkeley, she and her husband had given elegant parties, and my wife and I always got invited. Gloria spent hours fixing little sandwiches and served different wines, and she dressed up and looked lovely, with her sandy-colored short-cut curly hair.

Anyhow, Horselover Fat had no Nembutal to give her, and a week later Gloria threw herself out of a tenth floor window of the Synanon Building in Oakland, California, and smashed herself to bits on the pavement along MacArthur Boulevard, and Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe. Fat was ahead of his time, ahead of the universe. Eventually he forgot what event had started off his decline into entropy; God mercifully occludes us to the past as well as the future. For two months, after he learned of Gloria's suicide, he cried and watched TV and took more dope-his brain was going too, but he didn't know it. Infinite are the mercies of God.

As a matter of fact, Fat had lost his own wife, the year before, to mental illness. 1t was like a plague. No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America- 1960 to 1970-and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that's the truth. Fancy terms and ornate theories cannot cover this fact up. The authorities became as psychotic as those they hunted. They wanted to put all persons who were not clones of the establishment away. The authorities were filled with hate. Fat had seen police glower at him with the ferocity of dogs. The day they moved Angela Davis, the black Marxist, out of the Marin County jail, the authorities dismantled the whole civic center. This was to baffle radicals who might intend trouble. The elevators got unwired; doors got relabeled with spurious information; the district attorney hid. Fat saw all this. He had gone to the civic center that day to return a library book. At the electronic hoop at the civic center entrance, two cops had ripped open the book and papers that Fat carried. He was perplexed. The whole day perplexed him. In the cafeteria, an armed cop watched everyone eat. Fat returned home by cab, afraid of his own car and wondering if he was nuts. He was, but so was everyone else.

I am by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nonetheless, Gloria Knudson lies in a box in Modesto, California. There's a photo of her funeral wreaths in my photo album. It's a color photo so you can see how lovely the wreaths are. In the background a VW is parked. I can be seen crawling into the VW, in the midst of the service. I am not able to take any more.

After the graveside service Gloria's former husband Bob and I and some tearful friend of his-and hers-had a late lunch at a fancy restaurant in Modesto near the cemetery .The waitress seated us in the rear because the three of us looked like hippies even though we had suits and ties on. We didn't give a shit. I don't remember what we talked about. The night before, Bob and I-I mean, Bob and Horselover Fat-drove to Oakland to see the movie Patron. Just before the graveside service Fat met Gloria's parents for the first time. Like their deceased daughter, they treated him with utmost civility. A number of Gloria's friends stood around the corny California ranch-style living room recalling the person who linked them together. Naturally, Mrs. Knudson wore too much makeup; women always put on too much makeup when someone dies. Fat petted the dead girl's cat, Chairman Mao. He remembered the few days Gloria had spent with him upon her futile trip to his house for the Nembutal which he did not have. She greeted the disclosure of his lie with aplomb, even a neutrality. When you are going to die you do not care about small things.

"I took them," Fat had told her, lie upon lie.

They decided to drive to the beach, the great ocean beach of the Point Reyes Peninsula. In Gloria's VW, with Gloria driving (it never entered his mind that she might, on impulse, wipe out him, herself and the car) and, an hour later, sat together on the sand smoking dope.

What Fat wanted to know most of all was why she intended to kill herself.

Gloria had on many-times-washed-jeans and a T -shirt with Mick Jagger's leering face across the front of it. Because the sand felt nice she took off her shoes. Fat noticed that she had pink-painted toenails and that they were perfectly pedicured. To himself he thought, she died as she lived.

"They stole my bank account," Gloria said.

After a time he realized, from her measured, lucidly stated narration, that no "they" existed. Gloria unfolded a panorama of total and relentless madness, lapidary in construction. She had filled in all the details with tools as precise as dental tools. No vacuum existed anywhere in her account. He could find no error, except of course for the premise, which was that everyone hated her, was out to get her, and she was worthless in every respect. As she talked she began to disappear. He watched her go; it was amazing. Gloria, in her measured way, talked herself out of existence word by word. It was rationality at the service of-well, he thought, at the service of nonbeing. Her mind had become one great, expert eraser. All that really remained now was her husk; which is to say, her uninhabited corpse.

She is dead now, he realized that day on the beach.

After they had smoked up all their dope, they walked along and commented on seaweed and the height of waves. Seagulls croaked by overhead, sailing themselves like frisbies. A few people sat or walked here and there, but mostly the beach was deserted. Signs warned of undertow. Fat, for the life of him, could not figure out why Gloria didn't simply walk out into the surf. He simply could not get into her head. All she could think of was the Nembutal she still needed, or imagined she needed.

"My favourite Dead album is Workingman's Dead," Gloria said at one point. "But I don't think they should advocate taking cocaine. A lot of kids listen to rock."

"They don't advocate it. The song's just about someone taking it. And it killed him, indirectly; he smashed up his train. "

"But that's why I started on drugs," Gloria said.

"Because of the Grateful Dead?"

"Because," Gloria said, "everyone wanted me to do it. I'm tired of doing what other people want me to do."

"Don't kill yourself," Fat said. "Move in with me. I'm all alone. I really like you. Try it for a while, at least. We'll move your stuff up, me and my friends. There's lots of things we can do, like go places, like to the beach today. Isn't it nice here?"

To that, Gloria said nothing.

"It would really make me feel terrible," Fat said. "For the rest of my life, if you did away with yourself. " Thereby, as he later realized, he presented her with all the wrong reasons for living. She would be doing it as a favor to others. He could not have found a worse reason to give had he looked for years. Better to back the VW over her. This is why suicide hotlines are not manned by nitwits; Fat learned this later in Vancouver, when, suicidal himself, he phoned the British Columbia Crisis Center and got expert advice. There was no correlation between this and what he told Gloria on the beach that day.

Pausing to rub a small stone loose from her foot, Gloria said, "I'd like to stay overnight at your place tonight."

Hearing this, Fat experienced involuntary visions of sex.

"Far out," he said, which was the way he talked in those days. The counterculture possessed a whole book of phrases which bordered on meaning nothing. Fat used to string a bunch of them together. He did so now, deluded by his own carnality into imagining that he had saved his friend's life. His judgment, which wasn't worth much anyhow, dropped to a new nadir of acuity. The existence of a good person hung in the balance, hung in a balance which Fat held, and all he could think of now was the prospect of scoring. "I can dig it," he prattled away as they walked. "Out of sight."

A few days later she was dead. They spent that night together, sleeping fully dressed; they did not make love; the next afternoon Gloria drove off, ostensibly to get her stuff from her parents' house in Modesto. He never saw her again. For several days he waited for her to show up and then one night the phone rang and it was her ex-husband Bob.

"Where are you right now?" Bob asked.

The question bewildered him; he was at home, where his phone was, in the kitchen, Bob sounded calm. "I'm here," Fat said.

"Gloria killed herself today ," Bob said.

*

I have a photo of Gloria holding Chairman Mao in her arms; Gloria is kneeling and smiling and her eyes shine. Chairman Mao is trying to get down. To their left, part of a Christmas tree can be seen. On the back, Mrs. Knudson has written in tidy letters:

How we made her feel gratitude for our love.

I've never been able to fathom whether Mrs. Knudson wrote that after Gloria's death or before. The Knudsons mailed me the photo a month-mailed Horselover Fat the photo a month-after Gloria's funeral. Fat had written asking for a photo of her. Initially he had asked Bob, who replied in a savage tone, "What do you want a picture of Gloria for?" To which Fat could give no answer. When Fat got me started writing this, he asked me why I thought Bob Langley got so mad at this request. I don't know. I don't care. Maybe Bob knew that Gloria and Fat had spent a night together and he was jealous. Fat used to say Bob Langley was a schizoid; he claimed that Bob himself told him that. A schizoid lacks proper affect to go with his thinking; he's got what's called "flattening of affect." A schizoid would see no reason not to tell you that about himself. On the other hand, Bob bent down after the graveside service and put a rose on Gloria's coffin. That was about when Fat had gone crawling off to the VW. Which reaction is more appropriate? Fat weeping in the parked car by himself, or the ex-husband bending down with the rose, saying nothing, showing nothing, but doing something, ..Fat contributed nothing to the funeral except a bundle of flowers which he had belatedly bought on the trip down to Modesto. He had given them to Mrs. Knudson, who remarked that they were lovely. Bob had picked them out.

After the funeral, at the fancy restaurant where the waitress had moved the three of them out of view, Fat asked Bob what Gloria had been doing at Synanon, since she was supposed to be getting her possessions together and driving back up to Marin County to live with him-he had thought.

"Carmina talked her into going to Synanon," Bob said. That was Mrs. Knudson. "Because of her history of drug involve- ment."

Timothy, the friend Fat didn't know, said, "They sure didn't help her very much."

What had happened was that Gloria walked in the front door of Synanon and they had gamed her right off. Someone, on purpose, had walked past her as she sat waiting to be interviewed and had remarked on how ugly she was. The next person to parade past her informed her that her hair looked like something a rat slept in. Gloria had always been sensitive about her curly hair. She wished it was long like all the other hair in the world. What the third Synanon member would have said was moot, because by then Gloria had gone upstairs to the tenth floor .

"Is that how Synanon works?" Fat asked.

Bob said, "It's a technique to break down the personality. It 's a fascist therapy that makes the person totally outer-directed and dependent on the group. Then they can build up a new personality that isn't drug-oriented."

"Didn't they realize she was suicidal?" Timothy asked.

"Of course," Bob said. "She phoned in and talked to them; they knew her name and why she was there."

"Did you talk to them after her death?" Fat asked.

Bob said, "I phoned them up and asked to talk to someone high up and told him they had killed my wife, and the man said that they wanted me to come down there and teach them how to handle suicidal people. He was super upset. I felt sorry for him."

At that, hearing that, Fat decided that Bob himself was not right in the head. Bob felt sorry for Synanon. Bob was all fucked up. Everyone was fucked up, including Carmina Knudson. There wasn't a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else. He sat eating his salad and wondering where he could go. Out of the country. Flee to Canada, like the draft protesters. He personally knew ten guys who had slipped across into Canada rather than fight in Vietnam. Probably in Vancouver he would run into half a dozen people he knew. Vancouver was supposed to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Like San Francisco, it was a major port. He could start life all over and forget the past.

It entered his head as he sat fooling with his salad that when Bob phoned he hadn't said, "Gloria killed herself' but rather "Gloria killed herself today," as if it had been inevitable that she would do it one day or another. Perhaps this had done it, this assumption. Gloria had been timed, as if she were taking a math test. Who really was the insane one? Gloria or himself (probably himself) or her ex-husband or all of them, the Bay Area, not insane in the loose sense of the term but in the strict technical sense? Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness. I wish I could have helped him.

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